April 29, 2014

Mystery Meat -- Fairy Musketeer Akazukin

It's 39 episodes long, and I've watched the first 8. It isn't too bad. The hero, Souta, is supposed to be 14 but the way everyone is drawn, and the kind of voices they all have, it's more like this is grade school.

(Ringo)

Ringo is his neighbor, childhood friend, and almost-tsundere (she doesn't physically beat him but she crabs at him constantly). Her voice is Rie Kugimiya.

(Ibara, Akazukin, Shirayuki)

Akazukin has the same voice as Nanoha, and the seiyuu is just as good as always. "Akazukin" means "red hood", and she's Little Red Riding Hood. Shirayukihime is Snow White. Ibara (means "thorns") is actually Sleeping Beauty. Together with a talking wolf named Val, they are the Fairy Musketeers, whose symbol is a four-leaf clover.

(Gretel)

Two of the opponents are Hansel and Gretel. They are aided by a talking cat screwup named Randagio who has the ability to summon and control magical beasts called "nightmariens". And we've already run into Hameln, whose weapon is a horn. (No flute.)

Once there was a man who was wise and intelligent. The king gave him a job to do, expecting him to fail. But he succeeded, and in so doing gained great magic, to supplement his knowledge of science and technology. After that, he became insufferably arrogant and lazy, but increasingly powerful. The king was actually Kami-sama and for reasons not yet revealed, he decided to split the world in two.

Elde is the world of science and technology, and Fandevale is the world of magic. (And, evidently, of fairy tales.)

Souta and Ringo live in Elde and attend school there. Souta's mother vanished when he was very young, and his father is away working a lot, so Souta mostly lives alone. Ringo comes over to wake him up every morning, and she often cooks for him.

(Shirayuki, Souta, Akazukin)

Souta is a little strange: he can talk to flowers. They often respond by changing physically, becoming stronger and healthier and more beautiful, which is widely known, so he isn't teased for this. But most people don't truly believe, either. Anyway, there's a fairy tale his mother told him (the one about the arrogant hero and the king) which he keeps reliving in his dreams, which ends with monsters dragging his mother away and chasing him. In his dream, she doesn't finish the story.

He's out walking one time and hears a mysterious voice, repeating that same fairy tale, and he follows it. Turns out Souta is "Elde's Key" and only the key could hear it. The one speaking was one of Randagio's nightmariens, who attacks Souta and tries to capture him. Before he can, Akazukin appears and defeats him.

Then we get a series of introductory episodes, bringing new characters into the story. First Shirayuki, then Hansel, then Gretel, then Ibara, and the stories tend to include Man-from-Mars elements as the Fairy Musketeers try to operate on Elde without causing problems. Eventually they decide that they have to return to Fandevale, and take Souta with them. Ringo ends up going along, and as of ep 8 they're on the other side and the gateway to Elde is now closed, so they can't return until they win.

The final boss turns out to be Cinderella. We see her briefly a few times when underlings report to her.

It's a trifle, and it's rather too cute, but it's been fun so far. I'm not sure I believe that there's really 39 episodes worth of story in this concept without loads and loads of filler, but time will tell.

Someone on this site or in your blogroll (Pete? Mauser? I cannot recall) mentioned this about a year ago. I made it to about episode 6-7 before bailing. They said that there is in fact a deep, important story being told, but I just couldn't hang on.

It isn't bad, not at all; it's just wasn't something for me. Good luck with it, and - if you stick with it - I'm curious as to what I may have missed.

8
I'd forgotten that I'd commented on the Chacha Mystery Meat. You only watched one ep of that, so I guess this one must be better.

Posted by: muon at April 30, 2014 08:32 PM (XIprt)

9
My prediction: Steven will not last past the creepiness and violence and will use a filler as an excuse to quit, even though
none of the main girls die in the end. We need to start a deadpool. Dibs on 13.

April 26, 2014

Mystery Meat -- Momotaro, Divine warriors of the sea

This movie is historically interesting, not just because it's among the earliest Japanese animated features to survive. It was first shown in Japan on April 12, 1945, almost exactly 4 months before the end of the war.

1
Holy crap! Where'd you find a subtitled version??? The one I have is a lousy-quality, unsubtitled copy (not that you need to know Japanese to get the gist).

The Nell was, indeed, just as much of a tinderbox as the Betty. And the Japanese did have parachute units in WW2, as part of the Navy's "Special Naval Landing Force". They were used in the Dutch East Indies; the Battle of Timor saw the largest grouping of them, nearly 700... and they did indeed face the Aussies.

About the only good account of the SNLF Paratroopers out there is the wonderfully titled Blossoming Silk Against The Rising Sun. It's not particularly well-written, and needs an editor something fierce, but it's THE book on paratrooper assaults (both sides!) during the Pacific War.

The Nell had been shown to be a tinder box waiting for a match as early as the outbreak of fighting in China in 1937. The IJN's initial contribution was via airstrikes by the two air groups equipped with the Nell - which soon had to come to a halt due to extraordinarily high loss rates.

Oddly enough, despite a patent lack on interest on the part of the IJN high command for expanding the SNLF, they were willing to introduce vertical envelopment, about the same time the USMC was experimenting with their own parachute force.

IIRC, the IJA paratroopers who landed in Leyte were destroyed by a force that including paratroopers from the 11th Airborne Division.

Then there was what US intelligence dubbed 'Operation Damocles', which was the plan to one-way a force of airborne raiders against the B-29 bases in the Marianas. That was one of the primary reasons for Halsey and Task Force 38 raiding Hokkaido and northern Honshu in mid-1945.

6
I'm pretty sure they're supposed to be Australian. At 1:08:45 on my copy, there's a quick skirmish between Our Divine Sea Warriors and three armored cars. During the Battle of Timor, there was a similar action against Aussie armored cars trying to reinforce an aerodrome... which we also see, briefly.

The White Imperialism flashback just before the attack makes it seem more like Brits, but that could just be generalizing.

Come to think of it, the machine guns in the last shot are Maxim guns, aren't they?

They are Vickers machine-guns, which were based on the Maxim guns (And made by the same folks, since Vickers bought out Maxim.). It was the standard infantry heavy/medium machine guns of British and Commonwealth troops for a long time, including World War 2. It was especially popular with the AIF, whose units tended to grab as many of the Vickers MG they could reach.

I'm pretty sure they really are supposed to be British, or at least wearing British uniforms. This film came out after the Battle of Singapore, and the mass surrender of over 80,000 British troops (as well as Indian and Australian, but all fighting under the British crown and wearing British uniforms with only differences in insignia to distinguish them) was a huge cultural disconnect for the Japanese, who couldn't believe soldiers wouldn't fight to an honorable death. Naturally, this gets exaggerated and flanderized by the propaganda machine of Imperial Japan.

The major battles where the Japanese beat the living snot out of English speakers (American and British Empire) on land would have been the Battle of Singapore and the fall of the Philippines. I suspect, but cannot prove, that the Americans stationed in the Philippines were using the M1917 Brodie helmet. If you are trying to raise flagging civilian morale, you'd want to people to remember those battles even though they occurred long before April 1945..

This kind of animated feature has a long lead time, and it's entirely possible the production took a couple of years (especially in war time when resources like film and celluloid were hard to acquire). The story boards may well have been done in early 1943 when things were still looking pretty good. (Especially from the point of view of the home front, because the government had been concealing its setbacks.)

February 16, 2014

Mystery Meat -- Psychic Academy Aura Banshou

I thought this would turn out to be trash, but I got sucked in and ended up watching the entire thing in one sitting. It's 24 episodes which are anywhere from 7 to 9 minutes long. It's listed as an ONA, which I guess explains the varying lengths.

I'm not saying it's earth shattering, but it's a lot of fun. It doesn't drag, and Our Hero (named "Ai") isn't annoying, and he doesn't have a self-selected annoying best friend, and the story is interesting, and the girls are cute. Ai has a crazy roommate but he isn't annoying and anyway he doesn't appear very often.

This is Myu. One of the other girls has the ability to look in a crystal ball and find out things, and she says that Ai and Myu have 100% synchronization of their aura, or something like that.

That's Orina AKA Saara, certified Childhood Friend. She's also infatuated with Ai, and gets very jealous sometimes. But she isn't a tsundere. There aren't any in the show, another pleasant surprise.

As chance would have it, they're roommates.

The other member of the harem is that blonde, name of Faafa. She's really weird, in part because sometimes she's a guy named Ren. Who was her younger brother, and I didn't quite understand the explanation of what happened.

Unfortunately, the 24 episodes make up about as much material as 8 or 9 normal-length episodes, and while it does tell a lot of story, it doesn't come close to finishing any of it.

It's based on a manga which eventually ran 11 volumes and finished in 2003, so I assume the story went well beyond what I saw and did get finished.

Even so, I didn't feel cheated at the end. The part they did make into an anime feels pretty complete. There are plot elements left hanging, but they don't really nag.

February 15, 2014

Mystery Meat -- Groove Adventure Rave

This is based on a manga done by the same mangaka who does Fairy Tail. And there was a crossover OVA between the two that came out last year. I was curious to see whether it had been made into an anime, and yup, there it was on BakaBT.

In the OVA, Haru ends up teaming up with Natsu, and Wendy ends up with a couple of martial artists (one man, one woman), Gray with some guy who looks like him but is bad tempered, and Lucy ends up with Elie. Elie is tremendously stacked -- even more than Lucy -- and that's a plot point, since Fairy Tail is there searching for a big-breasted woman who wrecked a casino, and though Elie isn't actually the one, she fits the description and for a while Lucy and Happy think they've found their target.

So I was curious whether Elie in GAR was always drawn like that. Turns out not, and I'm not sure why they decided to change the character are so drastically. Fan service, I guess.

Once I looked at the cast list, I got really curious. First, Elie is voiced by Ayako Kawasumi, and so the Ayako Doctrine applies. Second, Haru is voiced by Tomokazu Seki, who is one of my favorite seiyuu. I don't think he's ever given a performance I didn't like, and sometimes he is absolutely brilliant.

So I just watched the first two episodes. I can't fault Kawasumi or Seki, but frankly it was mediocre. The problem was the writing, really. Also, I think I've gotten spoiled by modern animation technology. This came out in 2001 and it's all hand-animation on cels. Which means it's rough.

Also, Plue is annoying. In Fairy Tail there's an identical character, one of Lucy's summons, but it doesn't show up very often and it doesn't matter. (Except once; it won a battle for Lucy one time. Which I have to admit was pretty awesome.) But it's a major character in GAR and I still don't like it.

I'm not hugely inclined to watch any more.

UPDATE: See for yourself:

UPDATE: In terms of the writing, part of what drove me off is that the initial meet-cute made no sense. Why would either of them have any urge to travel with the other, besides physical attraction? And I don't believe that's enough to justify it.

Rave Master was the first manga published by Hiro Mashima, and it shows, in both story and art style. At best, it is a workman-like series, and at worst...

I did find it amusing that the English dub release had Jennifer Paige performing the ending theme, though.

Posted by: cxt217 at February 15, 2014 12:30 PM (GkAIU)

2
Rave Master does get better as it goes along, but the Manga did run a long while after the anime, so it goes a whole bunch of different places.

Elie's lack of breasts was I believe something of a running joke in the anime series (if I remember correctly), so it makes sense why that happens in the OVA. Also, in the anime, her bust size change depending on who was animating each episode.

For Fairy Tail, he pretty much took most of the same characters and made them look hotter. So Natsu & Grey are ripped, Lucy & Ezra are stacked. He learned to work his audience a lot better.

Oh, but do check out the final episode (51?), Hiro shows up playing a guitar and riding in a hot air balloon. Seriously. It was one of the wackiest "well, we're not getting another season!" endings in a while.

July 01, 2013

Today's Mystery Meat is Aiura. It has the reputation of "Thighs! Thighs!" and I did see that even starting with the first episode.

The art looks like JC Staff, especially the backgrounds, but they weren't involved in it.

It's another micro-anime. Episodes are one minute of OP, 2 minutes of material, 30 seconds of ED, and another 30 seconds of material for a total of 4 minutes. But it doesn't seem as if it's trying to be a breakneck comedy so much as a nice place to visit, and the pace is very comfortable, even a bit languid.

But it doesn't really work. The storytelling pace is about right for a normal 24 minute episode, and just about the time that things are getting moving, all of sudden there's the ED right in the way, and we're out of time.

And, well, I didn't get into it. After four episodes I was bored and had no urge to watch any more.

1
Series really tend to split into categories of "Watch once a week" or "Watch at once". There's a lot of reasons this happens, but Aiura was great to toss in between other episodes of series. Week over Week, it's a nice 4 minute chunk of cute.

But in 1 shot, I can see it not working so well. Like any SoL series, it tends not to marathon well. Also, a few of the jokes later in work, but it's mostly just short SoL antics.

And KanaKana being hilarious.

Posted by: sqa at July 01, 2013 02:25 PM (ehYGU)

2
She was a lot of the reason I got bored. I didn't find her even slightly amusing.

3
I thought the way Mei fell into her teacher's trap and became the class rep in 03 was pretty funny, but not much of KanaKana/Kanakon's antics were. The note file is full of "huh" (no, really -- becase my format requires a per-episode tag and there's nothing to write).

Actually, no, there's one note.
When girls began discussing their dreams for the future in 09, I wrote that I thought "I wish it was a dream of marrying into money" and one of them named just that. It was astounding.

When I formed taglines, for AIURA I put down "hopefuly not as bad as Yuyushiki; 3-minuters again?". Needless to say I turned around completely on their relative merits once the shock of HD art settled down a bit (of course Steven is not going to like Yuyushiki either).

June 30, 2013

Today's Mystery Meat is "Teekyu". It's a micro-anime: twelve episodes of only 2 minutes each. The OP is 30 seconds, so each episode is 90 seconds of concentrated merriment. (It says here...)

It feels cramped, for want of a better term. Once the OP is done, the dialogue begins, and it never stops until the end. Everyone talks fast and there are no pauses between characters. It's like the whole cast was overdosed on caffeine the whole time.

The animation isn't very good. There isn't actually all that much animation; it's mostly stills.

And the character designs are very basic, both in terms of how they look and how they act.

Was it funny? I didn't find it so. A lot happened but I don't remember even grinning once about any of it. Even with only two minute episodes I found myself bored and stopped after the fourth.

1
I'm considering the 2 to 5 minute series and the best were knock-offs like To Heart DVD pack-ins. Well, there's this newcomer AIURA, but it's just a studio showcase and thigh fetish. It's a tricky format in which to work.

7
What I was writing about was the manga, but yeah, this is probably it. They're both geniuses and childhood friends of the guy. Tits is an airhead geneticist, No-Tits is a tsundere roboticist. (Sorry, I can't possibly dignify them with names). I'm not sure what's with Invisi-girl, but I had a feeling that the manga was at the "introduce a new girl" point.

February 23, 2013

I admit; I downloaded this in search of cheesecake for the top rotation. May I present, for your viewing pleasure, Magical Bijin Rika-chan?

And, to make a complete set, Magical Loli Rika-chan:

I hoped that this would be like Nurse-witch Komugi compared to Soultaker. Soultaker is a horror title, but Komugi leaves all the horror behind and is basically a fan service romp.

Well, this left all the horror of Higurashi behind, and found all new horror instead. And didn't manage to find any fan service to speak of.

It's four episodes, each one standing alone. Those pictures are from the second one, in which Rika and Satoshi end up in a parallel universe where Rika is a magical girl who defends against a group of four adults who are evil magicians. Once Rika finds out what's going on, this is her reaction:

The fairy is Hanyuu, and this isn't the strangest thing in the episode.

Episode 1 was Keiichi, going through a series of nightmares, each of which ends with him waking -- into the next nightmare. The third one was about a pair of twins where one twin was trying to set up the other twin with Keiichi. And the fourth episode is about a (even younger) Rika coming in from an alternate timeline, and meeting the current Rika. All of them are extremely spooky, even the first one, which was supposed to be funny.

It's a strange experience. It would probably have been a stranger experience if I had watched the main show, but I remain convinced that it isn't the kind of show I'd like.

And, it didn't yield enough interesting shots to be worth incorporating into the top rotation.

3
The "When they Cry" series, from what I know, isn't even in your general part of the universe for what you'd like. But at least those two pics were okay. Too bad there wasn't more.

Posted by: sqa at February 24, 2013 02:24 AM (dvTNf)

4
The pistol is actually an airsoft gun. From what I remember, it's never actually brought up even in the main series, but it's revealed in supplemental material. It's kinda weird that she carries it around almost all the time she's not in her school uniform, but no one ever comments or asks about it.

Posted by: EYanyo at February 24, 2013 10:52 AM (RXa2b)

5
In the manga, it gets revealed as a airsoft gun when she pulls it on Keiichi, scaring him, and then shoots a pellet at his forehead. Mion (that's the one with the gun) uses it to win shooting games, like the festival they go to.

October 11, 2012

Mystery Meat -- Baby Princess 3D paradise 0 (Love)

I once coined the term "5-bladed razor" to describe shows which include ridiculous amounts of some particular thing, just to outdo anyone that came before. In the "hordes of sisters" category, I thought we had reached the limit with the show Sister Princess. In that one, our hero finds out that he has 12 younger sisters. His father seems to have been a tomcat, and had thirteen kids by thirteen different women.

Well, I just learned that there's a show that tops it. Baby Princess 3D Paradise 0 [Love] is a one-ep OVA, and it's today's Mystery Meat. (Pardon a momentary digression. That's what ANN says it's named, and that is what was used on the file. But the title page in the actual show says "2D", not "3D".)

Our hero is a senior in high school named Youtarou. He has recently joined his mother's family. He is one of her nineteen children, all the rest of whom are girls. That's right, he's got fully eighteen sisters, ranging from age 19 to a newborn. So this show leaves Sister Princess in the dust.

Little of this is explained in the show. Maybe it's explained in more depth on the studio's page for the show, but I can't read it.

I can't figure out where he fits in it all. The ANN page claims he's a high school senior, and that's the kind of clothes he wears, but there isn't room in there for that. The oldest girl is a college freshman and she refers to him as her otouto, so he's younger than her. But #2 is a high school senior, #3 is a junior, #4 is a sophomore, #5 is ninth grade, and we've got every other grade below that, all the way down to the newborn. Nor is there any indication that one of them is his twin. So where does he fit? Is he really offspring of that woman?

Having just slaughtered a few more catgirls, I admit it's silly to talk about those kinds of things when dealing with a show like this. They aren't paying any attention to whether it makes sense, and neither should we. But it has to be said that Mom is setting records for fertility, at least in anime. I don't know of any anime mother who has had 19 kids, all of whom survived, and none of which are multiple births. How many fathers are involved in all of this? No idea. But while she was creating all this life, she also had a career as CEO of a talent agency. Which is mind boggling. And there doesn't seem to be any man living in that house besides Youtarou.

I think the most amazing thing about this show is how many of the cast members I recognize. Kana Hanazawa, Haruka Tomatsu, Rina Satou, Aoi Yuuki, Mariya Ise -- this is not a B-list cast.

So how does it play? The word I wanted to use is "nauseating". Least that's what I thought before I started watching it. But that turned out not to be right. We'll get back to this at the end.

The first five minutes consists of introductions. Our Hero comes home from school and all the others are there and we get to see them all. Each one has her own intro placque that gets displayed, and I'm gonna put them all below the fold. (They weren't in order but I've sorted them.

And since a lot of the other shots I'm going to include are NSFW, everything else is below the fold, too. (I won't be using NSFW tags, so be warned.)

I just checked Wikipedia, and this was based on a series of short stories. The plot flow of it was guided by polls of the readership of the magazine it appeared in.

Anyway, it says Youtarou is 15 and first year of high school, which means that three or four of the girls are older than him. He's the same age as Hikaru, the one whose bra he removed. I wonder if they're twins?

They could be the same age without being twins, and it doesn't seem that Mom was opposed to perma-pregnancy...

I have a pair of cousins who are less than a year apart in age, which confused the heck out of me when I was a wee one... couldn't get my little brain around them not being twins but being the same age (if only for a month or so out of every year)...

Posted by: Mikeski at October 12, 2012 09:09 PM (1bPWv)

5
Try 75. I think the Tedium is what's given me a bit of a mental block about finishing doing the pics for MGX 13.

Create a zip file of your images - not of the whole directory (that causes problems right now) but just of the images. Upload that file to your images folder in Minx. Make sure the .zip extension is present and in lower case (I'll fix that later).

Say your zipfile is called MGX13.zip, and your pics are named pic01.jpg, pic02.jpg and so on.

You can now say:

[img=/images/MGX13.zip:pic01.jpg]

And the system will read the zip file, extract the desired image, and serve it up.